


Must Have Caught A Good Look At You

by finx



Series: Finx Plays AU Bingo [3]
Category: Chronicles of the Kencyrath - P. C. Hodgell
Genre: Alternate Universe - Supernatural (TV) Fusion, Gen, au where the twins are hunters! /jazz hands/, right now they're mostly just angsty, this entire fic is just anxiety and tension tbh, well - were hunters, which makes it also a modern au - mostly - with monsters & demons etc etc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-16
Updated: 2019-04-20
Packaged: 2020-01-14 22:26:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18485665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/finx/pseuds/finx
Summary: Jame, ashes at her back and yawning void in her memory, goes looking for her brother. He doesn't want to be found.





	1. Chapter 1

They were just dreams. He was fine. Tori had midterms, papers, projects, finals – he couldn’t waste time paying attention to dreams. He poured Red Bull into his coffee and pulled enough all-nighters to make his pre-med roommate cry and ignored them, and he was fine, even if his bones did start to feel like they were made of packed straw and his hands were always shaking. He was fine.  
  
If he woke up in lecture halls and study rooms covered in cold sweat, shaking, with a dead girl’s voice echoing in his ears…well, clearly he just needed more coffee.  
  
There were dreams of killing monsters, monsters that burned when he touched them with slender, unscarred hands, and he told himself they were jumbled memories. There were dreams where alien voices whispered in strange tongues, sussurous words that brushed against his skin like feathers of flame, and longing poured into his soul until he felt he would burst from the grief of it. And there were dreams where he was hiding, hunted, fleeing from a ghost who chased him down endless highways, through the grey remnants of a thousand motel rooms, or through the halls of this university that she had never lived to see. The dreams felt more real than waking sometimes, especially as the coffee-induced haze became a permanent fixture in his life. So when he saw the slight figure standing outside the door to his next class, he didn’t stop to think. He just bolted.  
  
Tori made it down three flights of stairs, across the quad, and into the Earth and Marine Sciences building before he blacked out. He woke up to a circle of concerned faces, his lungs burning and his legs as weak as porridge, and only then realized that this wasn’t a dream. In his dreams, he ran endlessly.  
  
In life, however, a month of sleep deprivation had done a number on his ability to get the hell out of Dodge. He struggled to push himself to his feet, waving off the worried bystanders, willing his shaking legs to support him. Someone offered him his water bottle, which had gone skittering across the floor with his fall and fetched up against a nearby wall. Someone else was on the phone – “No, he’s awake now, yes he’s standing up but he’s swaying a bit—”  
  
“I’m fine,” Tori insisted hoarsely, shaking the starbursts out of his vision and trying to stagger off, through the circle of anxious faces, away from the wide glass doors that faced into the quad. He was too visible still, too easy to find.  
  
As he stumbled backward, his eyes landed on a thin, pale face framed in dark hair.  
  
Her silver eyes locked onto his, a mirror image. The students around and between them faded away, their cautious questions reduced to white noise. Tori’s heart was pounding rabbit-fast in his chest, and he felt painfully like a rabbit himself, cornered by a snake. Every thought fled from his mind and all he could do was stare, frozen, helpless.  
  
Finally she smiled at him, small and melancholy, and turned away, passing through the open doors into the quad and vanishing into the crowd of students outside.  
  
Tori watched her go with whispers rustling at the edge of his hearing, whispers that he still couldn't understand but which crackled with urgency and fear.  


* * *

  
It wasn’t a friendly city at night. The asphalt glistened with oil-slick moisture from a brief, unsatisfying burst of rain; the streets echoed with staccato bursts of hoarse swearing and sharp, drunken laughter. Jame ambled down the dirty sidewalks with her hands in her pockets, watching her shadow as it was handed off from one streetlamp to the next. She didn’t bother being afraid for her safety. Anything in this city that had a shot at hurting her would know better than to try.  
  
She’d known that Tori was hiding from her. All this time she’d been pointing herself at him like a bird points itself north, following the undefinable tug in her belly that she knew without knowing how would lead her to Tori, and it had tugged back, uncomfortable and unwilling, as if trying to pull out of her grip. Her dreams, when they weren’t nightmares, were endless aching rounds of hide and seek, calling fruitlessly for her brother down highways and hallways and a thousand half-remembered motels. She’d known. It shouldn’t have felt so much like being gutted when she saw the abject terror in his eyes.  
  
Jame hugged her arms around the misery that bloomed sharp and keening in her chest. She’d thought – hoped – he’d at least be glad she wasn’t dead.  
  
A pack of drunk college students spilled out of a bar in front of her. Jame stopped rather than try to push her way through them, and watched idly as they sorted themselves out. One of them, a woman with a bright red undercut yelling loudly for her phone as she supported what looked like a dozing lumberjack, caught sight of Jame and gave out a little scream.  
  
Jame raised her eyebrows. “Didn’t see you,” the woman stammered. “Hahaha. You’re all spooky and quiet in the shadows and stuff.”  
  
Jame was standing directly under a lamppost.  
  
“Hey guys are we going or what?” the woman demanded, turning away from Jame and shifting the lumberjack’s weight on her shoulder. Her voice cracked on the question. The woman’s friends all started disagreeing about Uber. Jame watched with growing bemusement as the woman complained at her friends to hurry, trying to keep herself between them and Jame the whole time while pretending not to realize Jame was there. It was a poor performance, filled with increasingly high-pitched exclamations and increasingly anxious glances over at Jame and then quickly away, but then, she was very drunk. Jame leaned against the lamppost, mystified, and waited to see what would happen next.  
  
Finally a car pulled up and the college students flagged it down excitedly. The red-haired woman didn’t get into it, instead doing frequent, slightly slurred head counts under her breath as her friends tried to sort themselves into two groups. The second Uber pulled up while they were still arguing about it, and the red-haired woman started pushing her friends bodily toward one car or another, with a sharp tone in her voice as she did it that brooked no argument.  
  
If she was some sort of monster who had recognized Jame as a hunter, surely she’d have just run away by now, rather than stay and play chaperone. Jame had never once met a monster who didn’t regard a pack of drunk humans as nothing more than easy pickings. But if she wasn’t a monster, then why was she nearly green with fear at the mere presence of some scrawny teenager wandering the city on a normal Tuesday night?  
  
The woman watched the first car drive off with longing and relief painted across her face. Then with another frightened glance at Jame, she leveraged the faintly snoring lumberjack into the backseat of the second car, fussed over seatbelts a moment, and then paused, one hand braced on the door frame, the other clenched into a shaking fist. Her breathing had gone fast and a little shallow. After a few seconds, she offered her friends inside a rictus grin of a smile and said, “There’s no room for me unless I sit on Dylan’s lap, I’ll just crash at Sam’s place. You guys go on home.”  
  
Her friends protested, but she slammed the car door and rapped on the roof. The driver, presumably eager to get rid of their drunk cargo as soon as possible, pulled away from the curb without hesitation. Only after the last echo of the motor had faded did the red-haired woman turn, unwillingly, to face Jame.  
  
She looked to be somewhere in her mid-twenties, though Jame thought she might look younger without the heavy eyeshadow and smudged crimson lipstick. She wore what Jame, in her ignorance, had to assume were normal clubbing clothes – a sparkly green halter top and an asymmetrical miniskirt over leopard-print leggings, with black combat boots that could probably kick a man’s teeth in with one blow. She had a tiny black purse slung over one shoulder and absolutely no fangs, claws, or air of general menace that Jame could discern.  
  
But then, neither did Jame, with her hands safely gloved.  
  
The woman fidgeted with her purse’s clasp, worried at her lip, and studiously avoided making eye contact while Jame looked her over. After a few minutes she blurted out, “If you’re going to kill me, could you please make it quick?”  
  
Jame snorted. “Why, do you have an appointment after this?”  
  
The woman flinched. “No, sorry, I don’t, I mean I didn’t mean, I mean—” She gulped, and took a deep breath. “What do you want from me, my lady?”  
  
Jame raised her eyebrows. She hadn’t been pegged as a hunter then, but as…something else. “What’s your name?” she asked, stepping away from the lamppost.  
  
“Rue. My lady,” the woman added on hurriedly, shrinking back like she would very much like to back away but didn’t dare.  
  
“What are you?”  
  
If Rue was surprised by the bluntness of the question, she didn’t show it. “A selkie. From the ocean. Obviously. Sorry. My lady.”  
  
Selkies: aquatic by nature, rarely spent more than a week on land at a time. Traveled in family-packs of ten to fifty people, territorial but usually on good terms with their neighbors, generally preferred to negotiate than to fight. Never found this far inland unless they’d lost their pelt and been bound to servitude. Powerful shape shifters, could perform assorted minor spells to do with water, luck, and fertility; witches sometimes tried to enslave them as familiars, with limited success.  
  
Jame had never encountered a selkie, not in the month since she had stumbled onto the ashes of Winter’s bar and not in the years she’d spent following her father on hunts as a child. The knowledge appeared in her mind anyway, precise as an encyclopedia, with no associated memory to tell her where she’d learned it. Yet another clue to the delightful little mystery of the gaping hole in her past.  
  
“You’re awfully far from home,” Jame said rather than think of that. Rue’s breathing hitched. Did she think that was a threat? “Did someone steal your skin?”  
  
Rue shook her head. “I left it with my dad back when I left home. My lady. My parents sent me to college to learn about plastic and oil. I’m majoring in Oceanography with a focus on conservation and a minor in Material Sciences, because we keep finding poison in the fish and last year my baby cousin almost died when no one caught him eating candy wrappers. Technically selkies can survive away from the ocean for years and years, we just don’t like to, but I go home on breaks and sometimes on three-day weekends if I don’t have too much homework, it’s not so bad, I just have to—”  
  
Rue stopped abruptly, as if realizing how freely the words were spilling out of her mouth. Jame wondered if it was the fear or the alcohol that made Rue babble. She still had no idea what Rue was so afraid of.  
  
“So tell me, Rue from the ocean,” Jame said, trying not to sound like she genuinely didn’t know the answer. “Why should I kill you, quickly or otherwise?”  
  
Rue looked over at her suspiciously, finally making eye contact. “Is that a trick question? Like, do I give you a reason and then you say ‘correct!’ and then you murder me?”  
  
Jame pressed her lips together to hold back a smile. “I suppose that would hardly be very fair of me,” she said gravely. Rue made a face like she agreed but wasn’t about to go saying so, then another face like she’d just realized she’d made that face out loud. Jame wished all the monsters she ran into could be this drunk. This was easily the funniest conversation she’d had all…  
  
month.  
  
“Look,” she sighed, feeling abruptly guilty for taking advantage of Rue’s fear. “I have no intention of killing you tonight. If you really are just here to go to college, I don’t see why I should kill you at all.” Jame didn’t miss the way Rue went limp at that. “But I do need to know why you screamed when you saw me. How did you know what I am?”  
  
Not that Jame herself knew what she was, but every time she’d mentioned that lately it had led to someone laughing at her, then trying to stab her in the face. She’d grown rather reticent as a result.  
  
“Oh, well, I can see auras,” Rue explained in a rush, sounding a little giddy with relief. “It’s why I’m the one who came to college – I can see if someone’s, like, a witch or a vampire or something, and then I can deal with them, or at least avoid them. Usually,” she added with a nervous little shrug. Clearly, that hadn’t worked so well with Jame.  
  
This, too, Jame had heard of, though she remembered where. One of the hunters who’d stopped sometimes at Winter’s bar had had the gift of it, if a gift it was; he could spot monsters by the afterimages they left in the air when they moved, he’d told her once, different for each kind of creature. He saw things in humans sometimes, too, if they’d brushed up against the wrong sort of darkness. He’d seen something in her and Tori, by the way he’d startled whenever either of them walked into the room, but he’d always refused to tell either of them what.  
  
“What do you see in my aura?” Jame asked, genuinely curious.  
  
“Fire,” Rue said somberly, meeting Jame’s eyes for only the second time. “Enough to burn down the world.”  
  
Jame recoiled. Suddenly she was standing in front of Winter’s bar, watching the flames consume the mangled bodies of everyone she’d ever tried to love. She hadn’t had time to dig them graves. Instead she’d splashed alcohol in every room, covered each body she found in gasoline and rock salt from the basement, then set the whole thing ablaze. _Child of darkness,_ her father’s voice rasped in her ear, _are you so determined to see us all burn?_  
  
In the end, she had.  
  
Jame swallowed bile and breathed deeply through her nose. The city stank of engine exhaust, wet asphalt, stale beer, cigarette butts, but not charred flesh, not dried blood. Jame breathed deep and opened her eyes to find Rue watching her with naked curiosity. “You just…flickered,” the selkie said by way of explanation, waving one hand vaguely. “All the fire kind of went _fwoom,_ all over the place” – she mimed an explosion – “and then just went back to normal.”  
  
Jame drew a shaky breath and shoved her hands in her pockets. “Normal world-consuming fire, you mean.”  
  
Rue made another complicated face, but nodded.  
  
“How many auras like mine have you seen?”  
  
Rue shuddered. “None. My lady,” she added again. “I’ve seen fire, I know what it means, but never more than like, some flames around a person’s head and hands. Never…this.”  
  
Jame stepped forward without meaning to and Rue jerked away, stumbling a little and clutching her purse, eyes gone wide again. Jame stopped short, and tried to keep the eager desperation out of her voice as she asked, “So what does fire mean, Rue from the ocean?”  
  
“I–I don’t know, my lady, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said–”  
  
“Tell me,” Jame ordered.  
  
“Demons,” Rue blurted out, clearly regretting the word even as she said it. “Every time, it’s been a demon.”  
  
Jame felt an icy chill wash through her. _Child of darkness, monster, hell-spawn_ —well, it wasn’t like it was news, exactly. She thought again of Tori’s face, terrified at the mere sight of her, and had to fight the temptation to curl into a little ball and hide.  
  
Rue was babbling again. Jame struggled to tune back in. “—only seen three demons anyway, it’s not like I’m any sort of expert, I’m sure you’re not really—”  
  
“Rue.”  
  
Rue cut off sharply, watching Jame with trepidation.  
  
“Thank you for telling me. You can…go,” Jame said awkwardly. “I’m sorry to have kept you.”  
  
Rue blinked. “Um. Thank you, my lady.” She stumbled back a few steps, apparently unwilling to turn her back on Jame.  
  
Jame could hardly blame her. With a sigh, she reached for the thread in her belly that would lead her to Tori and pulled. He didn’t want her – why would he? She was a monster through and through, he was better off without her – but their father had died, and he deserved to hear it from her. She would tell him, and then…  
  
And then, Jame supposed, she’d get back on the road and find monsters to kill. If nothing else, the missing years of her life had apparently made her very good at killing monsters, as she’d had plenty of cause to find out. Something had tried and failed to kill her in nearly every town she’d spent the night, and at several rest stops.  
  
Like calling to like, it turned out.  
  
Jame turned on her heel and, for the last time, went looking for her brother.


	2. Chapter 2

Tori knew who it was long before the knock sounded at the door, but he jumped anyway. He’d honestly been expecting her to float through the wall, or just appear behind him and give him a heart attack. But she knocked, and Tori jumped, and when he stood and answered the door it was as a man walks to the gallows, back straight and chest hollow.  
  
She was the wrong age. He’d been too out of it to notice before, but it was the first thing he noticed now. He’d figured they’d still be twins, since she clearly wasn’t eight anymore, but she looked barely seventeen. She was thin, too, almost rangy, her cheekbones razor-sharp under her silver eyes. Tori wondered if this was what she’d looked like when she died – if she’d somehow survived when their father threw her out in the middle of that unholy storm, and then lived for years and years on the road, alone.  
  
Tori had been fifteen when he fled in the dark of night and caught the first Greyhound out of the latest nameless town. He’d been so convinced she was dead already. He could have found her, helped her, but he hadn’t even thought to search.   
  
“Hello, Tori,” she said softly. Her expression was shuttered in the way that meant, Tori remembered without meaning to, that she was hurt, and hiding it.  
  
“Hello,” Tori said. He was pleased to note his voice didn’t shake. “Would you like to come inside?”  
  
She blinked in surprise, but when Tori stepped aside to let her pass, she drifted into his apartment without a word.   
  
Tori shut the door behind her and realized he didn’t know what to do next. He was suddenly conscious of the mess – papers strewn across the kitchen table, yesterday’s takeout cartons scattered in front of the television, blankets and cushions in a sprawl across the floor – and at the same time, of the sort of luxury they had only dreamed of as kids. The TV was a flatscreen, with two separate gaming consoles underneath it – they were his flatmates’, not his, but she wouldn’t know that. He had an actual kitchen, a soft couch flanked by huge armchairs, curtains on the windows and plants along the windowsills. No damp stains on the ceiling, no mold growing by the sink, no weird smells – well, apart from the faint aroma of peanut butter chicken drifting over from the takeout cartons. As children, this was what they’d thought paradise looked like. For the first time in years, Tori was embarrassed by how spoiled he’d let himself get.  
  
She stopped by the sofa, black-gloved fingers reaching out but not quite touching the blanket thrown across the back of it, and turned, taking in the apartment. She’d lost that permanent jut to her jaw she’d had as a kid, like she was challenging the world to a fistfight at all times; now she was wary, distant, with all the coiled strength and thoughtless grace of a mountain cat. Tori couldn’t take his eyes off her. His heart was twisting in his chest at the painful familiarity of her _face,_ for all she was nine years too old and nine years too young all at once. It was the same face he saw in the mirror – slimmer, whether from youth or hunger or death or just genetics, and of course bare of the stubble he’d neglected to shave in these past few weeks of denying his dreams, but still his echo, down to the hunted, haunted look that lurked in the back of both their eyes. There was some part of him that looked at that face and wanted to cry, or maybe throw his arms around her and never let go.  
  
When she finally met his gaze, her silver eyes were filled with some emotion Tori couldn’t name. “It’s been a long time,” she said softly.  
  
He stuffed his hands in his pockets, not knowing what else to do with them. “You died.” His voice broke on the words, and Tori didn’t know if they were an apology or an excuse.  
  
She flinched, as if startled, and her face shuttered. She smiled, and it didn’t reach her eyes. “Guess it didn’t take.”   
  
He smiled back at her, painfully. There was a knot of grief climbing up his throat, devouring any words he might have thought to say in return.   
  
It mixed sourly with the fear that already thrummed with every breath. He’d hunted enough ghosts to know that they never came back unless they had a goal, one so all-consuming that they would claw their way out of the afterlife for it. It was pretty much always revenge.  
  
Twice, he’d let her die – once when they were eight and she’d vanished into the storm, and again when they were fifteen and he’d walked away from Ganth without looking back, not even to look for her. She had ample cause to come for his head. Could he kill her again, with his own hands this time, and still live with himself?  
  
Assuming, of course, that he even had a shot. Tori hadn’t hunted in years, and he’d left his rock-salt gun on the kitchen table, hidden under the mess of papers, like an absolute idiot. Maybe this time she’d be the one who killed him. It was almost, though not quite, a comforting thought.  
  
She stepped forward, one hand reaching out as if to touch him. He still didn’t dare try to name the look on her face. “Tori, I—”   
  
A single alien word cracked through the room, filled with such loathing that Tori was on the balls of his feet with his arms half raised to fight before he realized that it had only sounded in his head.   
  
She dropped into a crouch, a knife appearing in one hand, whirling to face the empty apartment. One arm was flung out, almost as if to keep him back, out of danger. The voice muttered blackly in Tori’s ear, a wave of harsh, rolling syllables that tickled at his understanding. He knew without thinking to wonder how that the voice was talking about her.  
  
Tori saw the moment when she realized that there was no threat, that there was nothing for Tori to flinch at but her. Her shoulders sagged, minutely, and her head dipped forward. He heard the soft huff of breath she let out, something between a sigh and a laugh. The muttering voice mimicked it, mocking.  
  
She drew herself up slowly, the knife vanishing to wherever it had come from, and carefully squared her shoulders before turning to face him once more. This time her eyes were empty of emotion. She fixed her gaze on his left shoulder and said in a flat voice, “I came to tell you that our father’s dead. I figured you should hear it from me.”  
  
Tori blinked, and struggled with the sentence. It didn’t seem to fit inside his head all at once. Ganth, dead – it was an impossibility, like gravity deciding to take a day off. Their father had always seemed an unquestionable fact of the universe, as immortal as the sun. He was just a man, Tori knew that intellectually, but at the same time it had never occurred to him that this meant he would someday die – sooner rather than later, probably, considering his chosen line of work.   
  
“That’s…not all,” she continued, and now a tremor crept into her voice. “Winter’s dead, too. Her bar is—I had to—to burn them, I—”   
  
Everything went strangely still. Brittle whispers rose in Tori’s ears. _Winter’s dead._ If Ganth’s death was an impossibility, Winter’s was an abomination. Winter, who had snuck them candy and taught them Latin, who had shown Tori how to garrote a man three times his size and patiently explained the concept of baseball. Winter, dead? It couldn’t happen, in no just world would it happen.  
  
His sister stood in his apartment, the ghost of everything he had tried to leave behind, too old and too young because Tori had let her die so he could build this weak new life for himself. He had long since known that the world was not just.  
  
The whispers were in no language Tori had ever heard, and he remained convinced he had no chance of understanding them even if he’d wanted to. But for a moment that conviction faltered, and he heard their meaning clear as day: _She will burn down everything your life has touched, and you will watch it all screaming from the grave she puts you in._  
  
Ice shivered down his spine. She didn’t seem to notice, looking down at her feet rather than at him. “There were twenty-three people in the bar,” she said after a steadying breath, with the air of someone delivering a report, “all of them dead. I made a list.” She pulled a small notebook out of her back pocket and laid it gently on the table, atop the mess of papers. “I didn’t know some of them, but I’ve been trying to draw their faces from memory in case you do.”   
  
Tori stared at the notebook. It was thin, flimsy even, clearly a cheap thing that she’d picked up at a gas station somewhere. It was a drab lime green, the sort of color you don’t choose unless the other options are worse. And it was resting solidly on top of a precariously interleaved stack of half-graded exams. Tori was nearly sure he’d seen the papers sag slightly under its weight.  
  
For all a ghost could kill you, no ghost could do that. Alien voices rustled in his ears, telling him that she was something more, something worse, but Tori fixed his eyes on the notebook and convinced himself once more that he couldn’t understand them.  
  
She shoved her hands in her pockets, awkwardly, and Tori’s attention flicked back to her at the movement. She peeked up at his face, and whatever she saw there made her set her jaw. She turned in a slow circle, looking over his apartment. Tori watched her, silent, unwilling to put words to the dilemma swirling in his gut. Then with one last quick, sad glance at Tori, she strode briskly to the door.  
  
Panic rose in Tori’s throat, sharper than the hissing whispers. He had let her die twice already. “Jame,” he said, a strangled cry, and it was like a dam breaking. Tori took a half-step toward her, one hand reaching out unbidden. The voices in his head screamed, furious and afraid.  
  
Jame turned to look at him, a disbelieving frown creasing that painfully familiar face. One hand rested lightly on the doorknob – she was already so close to being gone, and this time, Tori knew, she would not come back.   
  
Then, eyes wide and liquid with something unnameable, she stepped forward, closing the distance between them.  
  
Tori skated his fingers across her cheek and she was real, solid and warm, alive and impossible and here. “Jame,” he said again, his soul breaking on the word. “I’ve missed you.” 


End file.
